Courtesy Adaderana

The repatriation of migrant workers from the Middle East as well as other regions will be continued reassured Foreign Relations, Skills Development, Employment and Labour Relations Minister Dinesh Gunawardena.

It will be carried out in a manner sensitive to the vulnerability of these communities, particularly those who have lost legal status and/or employment in their host countries, stated the Ministry of Foreign Relations issuing a statement.

This will be done in consultation with the COVID Task Force, in view of the considerable strain presently placed on the health sector and quarantine centres following the increased number of COVID infected persons who have recently returned from Kuwait. It was noted that it is proposed to explore the possibility of getting PCR tests done prior to boarding all flights in future.

The Minister made these observations at a meeting held this evening (29 May 2020) at the Foreign Ministry attended by Foreign Secretary Ravinatha Aryasinha, Ministry of Skills Development, Employment and Labour Relations Secretary Sarath Abeygunawardana, Chairman Sri Lankan Foreign Employment Bureau (SLBFE) Kamal Ratwatte, and relevant officials of the two ministries and the SLBFE.

It was noted that according to the latest update, as at 27 May, 42,522 persons from 123 countries were seeking to return to Sri Lanka. Of these, migrant workers amounted to 34,881 of which 20,893 are living in the Middle East, while 4,961 were short term visa holders, and 2,016 were students.

Taking stock of the developments concerning those repatriated from Kuwait, it was noted that of the 466 returnees, 379 were those benefiting from the amnesty who had surrendered to the camps between 21-25 April and had been awaiting repatriation. 87 were those from Kuwaiti detention centres and prisons. Through Diplomatic Notes on 11 and 14 May 2020, prior to their eventual departure from Kuwait on two Kuwait Airways flights on 19 May, the Sri Lanka Embassy in Kuwait had requested the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Kuwait to conduct PCR tests on those being repatriated. However the Mission was informed that this would not be possible and that no passenger with COVID symptoms would be allowed to board the aircraft. It had also been stated that PCR tests had not been done on any of the returnees from other countries leaving Kuwait.

It was pointed out that at present the greatest vulnerability was in the Maldives, but particularly in Greater Male where a red alert has been declared by the Maldivian Government, which has explicitly requested foreign governments to evacuate their citizens. Of approximately 7000 presently seeking repatriation from the Maldives, almost 2000 are in Greater Male. On 14 May, 284 were repatriated and special approval had to be secured to evacuate a few medical emergency cases from outer Male. The Foreign Ministry has consulted the Maldivian authorities, who have expressed willingness for PCR tests to be done in advance on Sri Lankans to be repatriated, provided that PCR test kits and medical personnel from Sri Lanka would be made available to conduct these tests.

At the request of the COVID Task Force, the Foreign Relations Ministry has also consulted the other capitals from where repatriation flights are planned to the Middle East and elsewhere, to ascertain the possibility of conducting PCR tests prior to taking flights. It was noted that in most, PCR testing is only available for those showing serious symptoms due to limited facilities.

The SLBFE informed the meeting that to bolster the present capacity, four SLBFE training centres have been made available to the COVID Task Force for quarantine purposes in Haliella, Tangalle, Dambulla and Polonnaruwa.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the SLBFE will continue to support migrant communities abroad through the provision of dry rations and medicines, and helping with medical emergencies in their locations, while continuing to facilitate repatriation for those seeking to do so.

It was reiterated that the determination of those to be repatriated is based on vulnerability, conscious that this has changed from time to time. Starting with the initial wave of student repatriations, presently the concerned Missions strictly follow the chronological order in which the various categories – students, short term visitors and migrant workers, have registered their interest to return with the Missions. 

Other than for the Maldives, where all are deemed to be equally vulnerable in Greater Male, in the 15 other stations where SLBFE officers operate, deciding who in the migrant category should be prioritized, is done by the Head of Mission/Post in consultation with the SLBFE representative attached to the respective Mission. Priority is given to those who have lost their legal status or employment. 

Additionally a few exceptions with medical emergencies with documentary evidence, have been considered as special cases for repatriation. Missions have been instructed to strictly adhere to this protocol.

Courtesy Adaderana

Senior Officer of the Terrorism Investigation Division (TID) revealed Zahran Hashim’s list of reasons for choosing Sri Lanka as the location of the attack, to the Presidential Commission of Inquiry probing the bombings that took place on Easter Sunday 2019.

Some of the reasons cited, in previously unreleased video footage of the bombers, was revenge for the Christchurch mosque shooting in New Zealand in March 2019 alleged insult to the Islamic faith and in the hope the attack could inspire more Sri Lankan Muslims to gather around the Islamic State (IS) banner.

The Presidential Commission inquiring the Easter Sunday attacks heard evidence yesterday (29) from a senior officer of the TID who investigated the bombing in Tropical Inn at Dehiwala.

The witness was first questioned as to whether prior information had been received on Jameel Mohamad, the Tropical Inn attacker, to which he replied that intelligence information signed off by IGP Pujith Jayasundara had been received by the TID on December 09, 2017.

The 3-page document had flagged Jameel Mohamed as an ISIS sympathizer and called for further investigations into his activities, with 8 investigations carried out of which relevant reports were provided to the IGP.

The Commission then questioned the witness as to the contents of the reports that were sent to the IGP who responded that the reports revealed that the suspect did not use social media and that he had also advised his colleagues to avoid using social networking sites.

Further, the reports also revealed that the suspect had met with a Sri Lankan national by the name of Nilam who later joined ISIS and lost his life as a combatant for the group in a foreign country.

The witness further stated that on April 12, 2018, the TID had recorded a statement from Jameel Mohamed, and reported the facts to the IGP.

However, the witness then revealed that the final report sent to the IGP on April 08 2019 had found no evidence that Jameel Mohamed was inclined towards extremism.

The witness then presented the commission with details of his investigations for following the attacks where after the suspect’s identification following the Tropical Inn bombing the investigating team had proceeded to the suspect’s Wellampitiya residence where a search uncovered an Apple iPad, 02 laptops, 04 DVDs and an English language book on extremism and the waging of Jihad.

During the interrogation of the suspect’s wife, she revealed that Jameel had sent her a voice message on WhatsApp on the morning of the bombing where instructed her not to contact him and told her that he had not been truthful with her and was intending to follow the path of Allah. The recording also instructed her to show the message to the Police. The witness also revealed that although the message had been deleted, officers were able to recover it later on.

When the recording was played to the Commission the attention was drawn to the voices of several children in the background. Accordingly, the Commission Chairman instructed the Government Analyst to test the background voices against the voice samples of Zahran Hashim’s daughter and Jameel Mohamed’s children as well.

The witness also revealed that the digital video recorder of the CCTV system taken into custody from the Wellampitiya residence had shown the suspect leaving the location but footage pertaining to the 19th to 21st of April 2019 had been accidentally deleted by a foreign investigator assisting the investigations at the time.

When asked if any other evidence was collected during the investigations, the witness replied that he had also received a pen drive, a hard drive and a memory card from the Akkaraipattu Police Station, containing several videos filmed by the bombers prior to the attack.

The Commission then inquired from the witness whether that any evidence were found to determine their choice of Easter Sunday as the day of the attacks to which he responded in the affirmative and revealed that the evidence contained four main reasons for the attack and an additional 10 reasons for carrying out the attack in Sri Lanka compiled by Zahran Hashim.

The four reasons for the attack were claimed as:

1. to show love for the acts approved by Allah, and to reject those prohibited by them,
2. as revenge for attacks on the Islamic caliphate and the killing of Muslims
3. as revenge for the killing of Muslim faithful during the Christchurch mass shooting
4. to target foreigners from countries that support the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Syria who were staying at tourist hotels in the country.

In addition, the other reasons for carrying out the attack in Sri Lanka are:

1. for insulting and abusing Allah
2. for the placing of an image of a pig with the name Allah drawn on it in Kuliyapitiya
3. for comments made by Ven. Gnanasara Thero, claiming that Allah too will be incarnated
4. for abusive comments regarding the Prophet Mohammed
5. for the willful destruction of copies of Quran
6. for the demolition of mosques
7. for the burning of Muslim homes and the destruction of their livelihoods
8. for Sri Lanka’s participation in the international Christian Crusade against Muslims
9. in accordance with the laws of the Prophet Mohammed where he calls for the killing of the non-believers

In addition, several other facts outlined by Zahran were also revealed in the videos. This included the belief that the sacrificing of their lives for the cause offered a direct path to paradise, could inspire more Muslims in Sri Lanka to follow the IS.

Zahran also stated that the flesh and blood that spilled through the attacks will be the seeds of the Islamic Caliphate in the country and that the attacks must be carried out targeting their opponents in India as well.

Zahran also stated that the attack is to be carried out in defense of the Muslim people and as a tribute to Allah.

Calling the bombings ‘just the beginning’, Zahran also revealed plans to carry out several group assassinations, while urging non-believers to embrace Islam or submit to religious taxation.

Zahran also warned that Sri Lanka’s Muslims will be denied paradise for their lack of adequate sacrifices when fasting and visiting Mecca.

Courtesy Adaderana

Courtesy Hiru News

Twenty (20) more persons have tested positive for Covid-19 (new coronavirus) infection.

So far 55 positive patients have been identified today.

The country total has increased to 1,593 according to the latest information by the Epidemiology unit of the Ministry of Health

Courtesy Hiru News

Island wide curfew will be imposed at 10.00 pm today and will be in effect until 4.00 am on Monday 1st June.

Curfew will be effective from Monday, June 01st to Wednesday, June 3rd only between 10.00pm to 4.00am daily.

Curfew will be in force island-wide again on Thursday, June 4th and Friday, June 5th.

The president’s media division noted that thereafter commencing from Saturday the 6^th of June, curfew will be in effect only from 10.00 pm to 4.00 am.

Meanwhile curfew is in effect in the Nuwara-eliya district throughout today in order to maintain social distancing.

Asoka Weerasinghe (Mr.) Kings Grove Crescent . Gloucester . Ontario . K1J 6G1 Canada

28 May 2020

The Editor
DIPLOMAT Magazine
Ottawa, Ontario

Dear  Ms. Campbell:

Re: Visvajit Sriramrajan’s article – Post-War Sri Lanka: Fractured and Unjust forTamils.

I am surprised and disturbed that this article so rich with distortions and untruths found space in your valuable Magazine to be distributed among those in the  Diplomatic Campus, and the political conscience intelligentsia in Canada.  I was introduced to the magazine in the early 1990s by its founder/Editor/Publisher Bhupinder Liddar.

I note that the article is dispersed with the word ‘Advertisement’.  I am not sure whether the author paid a fee to have the article pick up ink in the Diplomat Magazine.  If so that’s unfortunate and it shows the power how money can buy to sell a disingenuous, unfair opinion to destroy a working Democracy, like Sri Lanka, and not giving Peace in that island nation a Chance, after a 30-year ruthless Tamil Tiger Terrorist War that haemorrhaged that island and killed over 100,000 of its peoples. 

 You have splashed Visvajit’s  TAMIL FACT about Post-War Sri Lanka,  in your Diplomat, and now I request you to juxtapose Asoka’s TAMIL TRUTH, for your valuable readers to be Judge and Jury who are interested in Sri Lankan Affairs.

Visvajit’s TAMIL post-war FACT says – This month marks 11-years since the Mullivaikkal massacre which shook the Northern Province of Sri Lanka back in 2009, with the brutal killing of nearly 50,000 Tamils over just a few days.  In other words, painting the majority Sinhalese as  the brutal killers”.  That is unfortunate.

”Asoka’s TAMIL TRUTH says – It looks like it didn’t shake Visvajit,  by the massacres of innocent unarmed Sinhalese people by the Tamil Tiger Serial Killers which was almost an everyday affair during the 30-bloodying War years.  They killed 100s,  not with  primitive catapults, rocks and stones or with bamboo sticks as used by the Indian policemen, but with sophisticated killing war weapons like Kalashnikovs, detonating Claymore mines to shoot metal pellets into a crowd in a pizza slice formation massacring 100s of innocent Sinhalese civilians on the spot. 

 Like on 11 June  1990 ,  shooting through the heads of 700 Sinhalese policemen who had surrendered to be sent South unharmed as promised to President Premadasa, after lining them kneeling in the Vinayagapuram and Trincomalee jungles with their hands tied at their backs.

Like on 2nd June, 1987 morning, the Tamil Tigers stopped a Buddhist pilgrim bus at Aranthalawa, Ampara,  after chopping  Venerable Indrasara, with a machete like in a butcher shop, and shooting point blank at his 32 innocent novice monks.  Shocking!  Visvajit seems to have forgotten these Tamil Tiger massacres and hundreds of others.  And not shocked by their brutality.

Well… well…well… Ms. Editor, do you really  want to propagate such selective alleged Tamil masacres, painting the Tamil Tiger serial killers ‘lily white’.  and charging the Sri Lankan Government for the alleged Brutal killings of nearly 50,000 Tamils over just a few days.

These are the incredulous numbers that the Tamil Tiger supporters are throwing at us, hoping and wishing the readers of Diplomat are a bunch of gullible fools and village twits.

For clarity of this perverse Fairy Tale, perhaps Viswajit would like to answer the following questions of mine.

Visvajit, it looks like that you are one more of Geneva’s UN’s Church basement Bingo Players pulling numbers from the air to make us believe that it was 50,000 Tamils who were massacred ‘over just a few days.”    Some bleeding-hearted  politicians of the West,  including Canada, said it were 60,000, 70, 000,80,000, 90,000 and also 100,000. That is a lot of people to be killed, and a horrendous job to hide the bodies in a sliver of land along the Nandikadal lagoon. Are you sure there was one or two of your people who kept count of the deaths to come up with the number 50,000? To make your life easy, let’s start to count the skulls, and find 50,000 of them.

If you can’t account for 50,000 skulls let me tell it to your face, Visvajit, you are one down-right mischievous, low, Tamil Tiger terrorist  supporting Humbug!  Nothing more…nothing less!”

Burying of the 50,000 bodies had to be done quickly and would have been a Himalayan task.  No Tamil refugee who was running for his/her life dodging Tamil Tiger’s live bullets told the world, Yes, we were made to claw the earth by the soldiers  to dig large holes and trenches to bury the dead.  Nor did the Red Cross, Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch tell us that there were five Backhoes digging  holes and trenches feverishly, to bury the 50,000 dead.  I wonder whether Visvajit was trying to fool us with his Fairy Tale of Humbuggery?

Nor were we told by any one that during the last few days of the Eelam War IV, that the air was black and had a putrid-sickening smell because the Sri Lankan soldiers wanted to get rid of the Tamil bodies quickly and were burning in pyres of tyres along the Nandikadal lagoon’s beach.  Come on, give me a break, Visvajit. Your Fairy Tale seems to have a stupid and an unbelievable foolish plot.  Did AI, Red Cross or Human Rights Watch tell us that they heard  a constant whirring noise  at night of fast moving fiberglass boats speeding to the center of the Indian Ocean, which ‘He thought were carrying dead Tamil boidies to be dumped in the middle of the Indian Ocean, all 500,000 Of them.

 But then,  for Visvajit’s information, no Indian Coast Guard vessel   of Tamil Nadu or fishermen  had picked up floating bloated  human carcasses and brought  them ashore along the East Coast of Tamil Nadu. So how credulous is Visvajit’s charge of Genocide against the Sri Lanka Government?   If he really wanted me/us to believe him, I feel  a bit charitable this afternoon, and  will give him a rare chance to prove the reasons of His charge of Genocide.  This is Visvajit’s  lucky day.

 I will give Visvajit a simple litmus test,  and if he is successful, I will honestly tell him, Yes, Visvajit, I believe you that there was indeed Genocide of the Tamils with the existance of 50,000 skulls.

And if he can’t he will hear my voice clearly,  and  I will place on his head a crown decorated with polished charnokite and kabook Sri Lankan rocks, most suitable for the Best Tamil Genocide Humbug in Asia”.

Here is Asoka’s TAMIL TRUTH  simple litmus test.

How would Visvajit reconcile with this Asoka’s TAMIL TRUTH with  that of his charge of Tamil GENOCIDE. 

This  Asoka’s TAMIL TRUTH, I know and Visvajit knows, and so does the whole world know that on 19 May, 2009,  the Tamil Tigers were annihilated militarily, on the beach sands of the Nandikadal Lagoon shores along the East coast of Sri Lanka.   

The whole world knew, except the Tamil Tiger sympathisers like him, who didn’t  want to know,  that Sri Lankan armed forces rescued 295,873 Tamil refugees by 19 May 2009, from the clutches of  the Tamil Tiger terrorist leader Velupillai  Prabhakaran and his  ruthless killing machine, the Tamil Tigers.  

Asoka’s  TAMIL TRUTH tells us that these 295,873 Tamil refugees were marched as a Human Shield from the west coast  to the east coast under a scorching Jaffna-Killinochchi Sun, like unwashed cattle, for 30 long months. Most starving wanting a piece of bread and for a drop of water to quench their thirst.

When they were rescued, my weeping heart said, people like Visvajit expected the 295,873 to be bumped off the way the Tamil Tigers bumped off the 700 policemen with their hands tied at their backs and blasting their skulls with bullets bought out of funds collected by the Canadian Tamil Diaspora and stuffed into Tamil Tiger War chests in Canada.  That didn’t happen.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

Visvajit, don’t you see that your Fairy Tale is breaking down storyboard by storyboard, as a Tamil Separatist Tale of Humbuggery.  

So what the UN Bingo players, Ban Ki-MOON,  Marzuki DARUSMAN, Steven RATNER, Yasmin SOOKA, Navi PILLAY and Prince Zeid bin RA’AD, in a Geneva Church Basement  were trying every permutation to come up with the number of deaths of Tamil Tigers during the last five months of the War, to hurt Sri Lanka.  So came out with a variation of numbers from 40,000 to 100,000 to find the correct number of Tamils allegedly massacred by he Sinhalese soldiers defending Sri Lanka’;s sovereign real estate.  The right number was always there, The UN said it was

7-3-9-8 and BINGO! And that’s the lucky number fought without a War Manual for Dummies by the UN – How to Win a War against Terrorists without Killing a Single terrorist.

If  Visvajit was not aware  of this he will now  know after reading’

Asoka’s Tamil TRUTH:  that after rescuing 295,873 Tamil refugees from the clutches of the Tamil Tigers by the compassionate Sinhalese men and women in khaki, whites  and blues, who did not have a heart to bump them off, and went ahead  and helped the Government to house them in temporary camps, and prepared a million (100,000) hearty breakfasts, lunches and dinners every day to sustain these Tamil refugees.  And that is the Holy Truth.  That was one great Classy Textbook Classic of a Compassionate Act, by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces, which was never performed before by any National Army around the world.  I say to you Visvajit, make a note of it and don’t you ever forget it.  The Sinhalese soldiers men and women in khaki, whites and blues saved your Tamil people with a lot of caring and

Affection.. And this is another Asoka’s TAMIL TRUTH’s

Well…I’d like to know how  Visvajit Sriramrajan  would reconcile  with Sri Lankan Armed Forces compassionate Act, with his  vulgar charge of Tamil Genocide as the grand finale of this 30-year long brutal unnecessary war by the Tamil separatists.  What was despicable was that the Tamil terrorists were aided and abetted by foreign countries like India, Canada, Norway, UK, France, Demark and a few other foreign countries in the West.

And to conclude my expose of Visvajit Sriramrajan’s Liars Fairy Tale of Tamil Genocide in Sri Lanka, I feel that this is Visvajit’s Lucky day, 

Here is his last chance for Visvajit to defend his thesis of the Charge of Genocide of 50,000  of Tamilian people in Sri Lanka’ by the island’s armed force.

War statistics always claim that at the conclusion of every war between two countries, the number of casualties is double the number of soldiers and civilians killed. If that is indeed the norm, then, I’d like to know from Visvajit,  what happened to the wounded casualties, some maimed for life, of  that 100,000 people?  Were they left behind by the foreign bleeding heart bullies, without crutches, to hobble their way to find their homes and their loved ones; not enough bandaids to cover their  gashing, bleeding wounds exposed to the scorching Nandikadal sun; with nothing to eat or drink.  With no walkers to get them to safety and no stretchers to carry the badly wounded. What happened Visvajit?    They were a bunch of cruel bleeding hearts from the West,, won’t they! What happened to your Western bleeding-hearts. No one ever talks of the 100,000 casualties, not even , Geneva’s Church basement UN’s BINGO players like, Ban ki-Moon,  Mazurki Darusman, Steven Ratner, Yasmin Sooka, Navi Pillai, Prince Zeid bin Ra’ad, British Labour MP for Mitcham and Morden, Siobhain McDonagh, who pulled out the number dead at 100,000 and I asked her in  a letter,Tell me Siobhain what the  heck did you put in your  morning  coffee to hallucinate so badly.”  So plotting they did, juggling the numbers of Tamils killed during the last five months of the Tamil Terrorist War.  To see whether they could nail Sri Lanka onto a crucifix sighting these  lies.  That’s the rub, and that is how the cookie crumbled.

My last bit of advice to Visvajit Sriramrajan is, just cut out your stupid charge of Genocide of the Tamils in Sri Lanka as it never happened.  Don’t be so stubborn, idiotic and bullish.  You won’t go anywhere with this string of baloney which is still bleeding from lies by Tamil Tiger backers like You. Don’t cut out yourself as a pathetic cardboard-Humbug. Take my brotherly advice,  Pack up your Goody-two-shoes-foolishness and go home and have a peaceful sleep.

It was the Tamil separatists and politicians who were spoiling for a fight with the Sri Lankan Government and not showing any gratitude having lived for 131 years as the privileged minority” during the divided and rule policy of the British when Ceylon (Sri Lanka) was her colony, while the Sinhalese lived as the wronged majority”.

If the Tamils wanted to live by the gun, then  they should be prepared to die by the gun and stop  sulking and complaining through important political magazines like the Diplomat.  It is that simple.

For winning this unwinnable war”, and giving back to 20 ½ million Sri Lankan people their Right-to-Their-life which was hijacked for 30 years by the Tamil Tiger terrorists,  I bow to every Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, Burgher and othe minority men and women dressed in khaki, whites and in blues saying Thank You for being an amazing family of yours and my Mother-Lanka for whom you stood tall and guarded  her when she really needed you.”   Thank you…Thank you..Thank you!

Sincerely,

Asoka Weerasinghe (Mr.)

2066 Kings Grove Crescent . Gloucester . Ontario . K1J 6G1

Dr Sarath Obeysekera

When I heard that government intends to import cows to Sri Lanka I decided to republish my own article published Last year 

Dr Sarath Obeysekera

I listen to President’s speech where he righty vouched to drastic take  action to severe connections with any International agencies if these agencies act against our war heroes 

We also have to admit that the Sri Lankan’s working and remitting foreign funds which we desperately need are also performing yeoman service to our country.

We should also consider them as heroes who support our economy

But Kuwaitis have done a very inhuman act by punishing them  by sending them to Sri Lanka

Even though the Ambassador of Sri Lanka in Kuwait who was trying to whitewash the rulers

Our  local hero Anil Jasinghe claims that these Lankans who were forcibly repatriated would have been infected before they were sent to Sri Lanka 

H E The President should hold an inquiry and blacklist Kuwait and prohibit our workers traveling to Kuwait to work

Dr sarath obeysekera 

කුවේට තානාපතිගේ කෙප්පය හෙලි වේ.. ලාංකිකයන් එවා ඇත්තේ කොරෝනා පරීක්‍ෂා නැතිවයි..

May 29, 2020 at 3:00 pm | lanka C news

ශ‍්‍රී ලංකාවට එවීමට පෙර කුවෙට්හි රඳවාගෙන සිටි කාලය තුළ තමන්ගේ කොරෝනා පරීක්ෂාවක් සිදු නොකළ බව එරට සිට මෙරටට පැමිණි ශ්‍රී ලාංකිකයන් සඳහන් කරති.

Dr Sarath Obeysekera
CEO Walkers Colombo Shipyard
Colombo
Sri Lanka

Dr. Gamini Padmaperuma, a Chartered Professional Engineer and a former Senior Lecturer at OUSL,

The term Blended learning” is used frequently along with the term e-Learning”. Is it just another buzz word or an old wine in a new bottle? 

It is relevant to review the present situation in the country with reference to computer literacy and the percentage of households owning computers in different sectors, urban, rural, estate, etc. Computer literacy/Computer ownership as a percentage (Sri Lanka: 30.1/22.2, Urban: 41.5/38.3, Rural: 28.6/19.9, Estate: 13.7/3.8), as per the published statistics.

The above statistics clearly indicate a vast disparity within the sectors in computer literacy and ownership of computers by households. Under such situation, a heavy emphasis on e-learning or technology based education could worsen the present relative social standing of rural and estate sectors. While actions need to be taken to reduce the above disparities in the longer run, it is imperative that less privileged sectors be provided with facilities such as blended learning to mitigate the disparities currently exist.

Blended learning is defined as a combination of multiple approaches to pedagogy or teaching. It is achieved through the combination of virtual and physical resources. Blended learning is a blend between e-Learning and traditional delivery methods such as traditional class rooms, printed learning material, etc. 

Most learners are familiar with how teachers use different delivery methods to achieve learning outcomes, e.g. lectures, discussion groups, drills and practices, role plays, audio/video clips, computer-based tutorials, etc. Therefore, it can be said that blended learning is a new name for an old concept.

Blended learning can cater to a large cross section of learners including rural and estate sectors in achieving their learning goals by accommodating different modes of delivery, models of teaching and styles of learning. All students do not learn in just the same way nor do they have same accessibility to technology; therefore, it is important to provide different methods, media and approaches to learn the same content by different students.

With regular Internet, TV, radio, etc., it is possible to deliver educational and training content for the benefit of the learners throughout the country. The content could include material for school and university programmes, improvement of general skills such as English knowledge and computer literacy, vocational skills such as repair and maintenance of automobiles, computers, etc. However, those who are familiar with distance learning are aware of the main hardships the learners face; the lack of tutor support and feedback.

The “theory” part of the learning task can be delivered through the technology mentioned above. How can the tutor support and feedback be provided? The way to proceed may be to use a blended learning approach. It is possible to meet the above learner needs through a combination of online and face-to-face tutor support. Face-to-face tutor support can be provided at venues such as Open University’s regional centres, University of Vocational Technology, technical colleges, and other suitable public and private sector educational establishments. This is a feasible approach that would directly benefit the rural sector learners.

The learners would choose the method that suits them best based on preference, accessibility, affordability, etc. Different approaches in delivery are also necessary due to different learning contexts (traditional learning, distance learning, etc.), learner types (auditory learners, visual learners, etc.) and leaning tasks (facts, concepts, etc.). Also, when the technology is not equally accessible to the entire cross-section of learners, blended learning could provide alternatives to choose from.

The factors that influence the blend of methods and technologies used to achieve desired learning objectives include: learning context, type of learners, learning task, availability, accessibility and learner attitudes towards using technology for learning, time availability for learning, language and subject proficiency levels, pace at which learning goals are to be achieved, the pedagogical approaches.

The actual making of the ‘blend’ should be based on proper study and evaluation of the learning situation. Such study is called Instructional Design. A typical instructional design process includes five stages; Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (ADDIE). The most critical of these stages is the first stage, Analysis. Analysis is the basis for design of instructions and their delivery. The Analysis stage consists of three components; analysis of learning context, the learner, and the learning task. The selection of the type of instruction and the mode of its delivery is based on the findings of the instructional analysis. Analyses of the learning context and the types of learners will provide information on: gaps in knowledge, learner background, preferred styles of learning, performance levels, language proficiency, computer literacy, access and attitude towards technology, time constraints, etc.

These findings have implications on the design and delivery of instructions. For example, if most of the learners are either auditory or visual learners, the design of instruction should include audio and video components. Similarly, if the learners are adults who work full-time or part-time, face-to-face delivery of instruction is not suitable as the primary mode of delivery. In this case the design and delivery of instruction should be made to suit a distance learning environment. Then, the question arises as to what type of distance learning is affordable. Does the learner have access to ICT where instructions can be delivered in the form of offline content or online through the Internet? If the learners have no access to ICT, then the option will be to provide the learners with print material designed for distance learning or media broadcasts. If the analysis shows that a good part of the learners have access to ICT, then the delivery of learning content should be made through both ICT, print material and/or media broadcasts. This is just an example of blending different methods of delivery of instruction to suit different types of learners and learning contexts.

Blended learning methods also become relevant when implementation of different steps in the learning process is considered. The different steps that a learner needs to go through to accomplish a learning task are known as Events of Instruction. There are nine events of instruction: Gaining attention, informing the learner of the objective, stimulating learner’s attention, stimulating recall of prior knowledge, providing learning guidance, eliciting performance, providing feedback, assessing performance, and enhancing retention and transfer. Different approaches or media could be used to achieve each event of instruction. 

The type of learning task too has a bearing on the methods of delivery. Design of events of instruction varies from task to task. Providing learning guidance, eliciting performance, giving feedback, etc. will be dependent on the type of learning task and mode of delivery. Giving feedback on learner performance will be quite different in a computer-based learning environment as compared to a face-to-face learning environment. Also, intelligent tutoring systems can evaluate the learner input and suggest possible routes for solving a problem or task. It is the instructional designer’s task therefore to select the appropriate mix of media to ensure effective learning under a given learning situation. 

However, the challenges associated with such an endeavour include the design and development of suitable indigenous learning content suitable for delivery through technology and design and implementation of pedagogically sound blended learning environments that will result in successful learning outcomes.

With such blended learning settings, a large portion of the country’s population including those in rural sectors can benefit from the new technology and the country can steadily move towards its vision to become a knowledge-based economy with a more equitable society.

Author:

Dr. Gamini Padmaperuma, a Chartered Professional Engineer and a former Senior Lecturer at OUSL, holds a PhD from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand in Instructional Design for Computer-Based Learning. Email: gamini_pad@hotmail.com

Courtesy NewsIn.Asia

India eager to participate in Lanka’s post COVID economic recovery, through development projects and cooperation as per Lanka’s requirements.

Colombo, May 29 (newsin.asia): The High Commissioner of India in Sri Lanka, Gopal Baglay, paid a courtesy call on President Gotabaya Rajapaksa at the Presidential Secretariat on Friday.

Pointing out the contribution of Indian investments in Sri Lanka’s economy, the Indian High Commissioner told the Lankan President that Indian companies are ready to invest in the priority sectors identified by Government of Sri Lanka.

Building on the areas identified as mutual priorities in the tele-conversation between the President and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on May 23, it was agreed to accelerate India’s participation in Sri Lanka’s post COVID economic recovery, including through development partnership projects in Sri Lanka and cooperation in trade, commerce and new areas with particular reference to Sri Lanka’s requirements.

The envoy conveyed the greetings of the leadership of India to the President and the people of Sri Lanka. The High Commissioner expressed his gratitude to the President for accepting the credentials in an innovative manner via a video conference.

President Gotabaya fondly recalled his first State Visit to India in November 2019, the first overseas visit by him after assuming the office. He thanked the Government of India for assisting Sri Lanka in dealing with the COVID19 pandemic and stated that he looks forward to further strengthening all-round bilateral cooperation between India and Sri Lanka.

The High Commissioner noted that the recent high level interaction between the two countries had given a further impetus to the traditionally close and excellent relationship. Recalling Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s solidarity visit to Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the dastardly Easter Sunday attack in 2019, the High Commissioner noted the commitment of India at the highest level, as Sri Lanka’s closest maritime neighbor, to deepening its partnership with Sri Lanka for peace, prosperity and security of the two peoples.

President and the Indian High Commissioner stressed the need to expedite the implementation of already agreed joint projects for the benefit of both countries. Areas such as tertiary education, tourism, information and communication technology, agriculture and agri-based products were mentioned for enhancing bilateral cooperation.

The President and the High Commissioner also discussed ways to further expand and strengthen the ongoing close cooperation in the fields of defense and security including exchange of experience, expertise and information; and joint efforts to tackle common threats such as terrorism

The Indian High Commissioner said that India was ready to provide more opportunities for Sri Lankan scholars to study in India in their chosen fields. President Rajapaksa pointed out the need to develop people to people relations in addition to economic and trade cooperation.

Both Sri Lankan President and Indian envoy agreed in order to overcome challenges posed by COVID – 19 pandemic mutually beneficial cooperation between countries of the region should be consolidated.

The Lankan President and the High Commissioner further noted that the shared heritage of Buddhism and the civilizational links between India and Sri Lanka provide a robust platform for bringing the two peoples even closer

The Principal Advisor to the President Lalith Weeratunga was presented at the discussion.

Courtesy Adaderana

A 24-hour curfew will be in force in Nuwara Eliya District on Saturday (30), says the President’s Media Division (PMD).

As mentioned in the updated curfew notice issued yesterday (28), a countrywide curfew will be imposed on May 31 (Sunday), the PMD said further.

From June 01 onwards, the curfew will come into force as specified in yesterday’s notice:

•Curfew will be in force island-wide throughout the day on Sunday, (May 31st).

•Curfew will be effective in all the districts from Monday (June 01) to Wednesday (June 3) only between 10.00 pm to 4.00 am daily as before.

•Curfew will be in force island-wide on Thursday (June 4) and Friday (June 5).

•From Saturday (June 6) onwards curfew will be effective in all the districts, as before, from 10.00 pm to 4.00 am daily until further notice.

Courtesy Hiru News

Ten (10) more persons have tested positive for Covid-19 (new coronavirus) infection. All of them are returnees from overseas.

So far 28 patients have been identified today and seven (17) from the Navy and eleven (11) returnees from overseas.

The country total has increased to 1,558 according to the latest information by the Epidemiology unit of the Ministry of Health

Courtesy Hiru News

Minister of Tourism and Aviation Services Prasanna Ranatunga stated that they have decided to conduct PCR tests on all incoming passengers from overseas will be subjected to a PCR test at the airport to ascertain for coronavirus is infection.

He said that the decision was taken when Health Minister Pavithra Wanniarachchi and Army Commander Lieutenant General Shavendra Silva made an observation visit to the Katunayake airport yesterday.

At a discussion with the President last week regarding the opening of the airport to foreign tourists from August 1, the Health Minister and other delegates visited the airport yesterday to look into the health and safety arrangements at the airport.

The Director General of Health Services Dr. Anil Jasinghe said that three persons who had been diagnosed with coronavirus from Kuwait were being treated at the ICU.

Meanwhile, around 5000 self-employed persons have been provided with health and safety advice at the Viharamaha Devi Park today as they commence their self-employments after the lifting of curfew in Colombo.

Courtesy Hiru News

Hatton District Judge and Magistrate J. Trotsky, today ordered a post mortem examination of the black panther who died while undergoing treatment at the Udawalawa Veterinary Hospital to be conducted in the Peradeniya Veterinary faculty.

This was after considering a request made by Prabash Karunathilaka of the Wildlife Conservation Department of the Nallathanniya Wildlife Office.

The black panther was found caught in a snare at a vegetable farm on Laxapana-Walamalai estate on the 26th and was taken to the Udawalawe Veterinary Hospital after being initially treated by wildlife officials.

Udawalawe Veterinary Surgeon Malaka Abeywardena said that this rare black panther died while receiving treatment.

He stated that the animal may have died due to complications from the wounds around the neck area of the leopard.

However, Prabash Karunathilaka of the Wildlife Department of the Nallathanniya Wildlife Office stated that the dead leopard was not seriously injured.

He also stated that he has expressed his reluctance to take the black leopard to the Udawalawa Veterinary Hospital.

He said that it was because he thought that moving the animal to a different climatic environment could have an impact.

He further stated that he has requested the court to carry out the post mortem examination of the Black Panther.

H. L. D. Mahindapala

Despite all the convoluted threads of history and politics running through the Vadukoddai Resolution there is only one simple meaning in it: it is a classic case of a crime against peace, the first crime listed in the Nuremberg Charter on which the Nazi war criminals were tried by an international court. The central argument in the Vadukoddai Resolution was worked tendentiously to conclude that they had no alternative but to go to war. History, however, is open-ended and there are always options available for human actors to choose between unmanageable extreme means spinning out of hand causing chaos and the manageable and consensual means which provide the least painful and offensive way to progress. But in deciding arbitrarily to declare the Vadukoddai War the Tamil leadership committed one of the serious crimes in history: crime against peace.

It is a crime defined and recognised in international law. According to the Nuremberg Charter, this declaration of war by the Tamils assembled in Vadukoddai, the parliamentary constituency of their leader, S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, constituted a crime against peace.” The Charter listed three categories of crimes: (1) crimes against peace, which involved the preparation and initiation of a war of aggression, (2) war crimes (or conventional war crimes”), which included murder, ill treatment, and deportation, and (3) crimes against humanity, which included political, racial, and religious persecution of civilians. – British Encyclopaedia.

The Vietnamese Criminal Code was more specific. In Chapter XXIV: CRIMES OF UNDERMINING PEACE, AGAINST HUMANITY AND WAR CRIMES, Article 341, referring to undermining peace, provoking aggressive wars, says: Those who propagate and/or incite wars of aggression, or prepare, carry out or participate in wars of aggression against the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of another country, shall be sentenced to between twelve years and twenty years of imprisonment, life imprisonment or capital punishment.”

Ignoring the Nuremberg convictions of the Nazi leaders who planned strategically and deliberately committed the crime of peace – a crime that led to World War II — the Tamil leadership arrogantly declared war against an elected state that was not at war with any community. The politically charged declarations in the Vadukoddai Resolution were to define themselves as citizens of their homeland” of Eelam who were committed to wage a war, or participate in a war of aggression against the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Sri Lanka.

The Vadukoddai Resolution was designed to provide the justification for going to war. But it was a futile war that did not bring the Tamils any good. It did not take them anywhere. This poses serious questions which the Tamil leadership have to answer to their own people:

1. Who is responsible for a futile war that did not achieve anything for the Tamil people? If it did not achieve anything was this war necessary?

2. Why did the Tamil leadership – not to mention the theorising intellectuals – covertly or overtly, directly or indirectly, go along with the Tamil fascist terrorists (the deadliest” – FBI) that were killing their own people more than all the others put together, according to S. C. Chandrahasan and V. Anandasangaree?

3. Having betrayed and abandoned their own people without lifting a single finger to protect them against the worst killer of Tamils since Sankili (massacre of Tamils in 1544) why is the Tamil leadership pretending to be the saviours of the Tamils now by pointing an accusing finger at the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) which liberated them from the fascist tyranny of their Suriya Devan”? Is this not a blatant and hypocritical attempt to deflect their guilt and responsibilities of protecting their own people to the GOSL?

4. Why didn’t they go to UNHRC to protect the Tamil people from the Tamil predators? Isn’t it because it is politically disadvantageous to expose Tamils committing crimes against Tamils?

5. Why did they cover-up the genocidal killing of Tamils by Tamils by hiding behind the Vadukoddai ideology, particularly that of blaming the Sinhala bogeyman?

6. Why do they keep blaming the Sinhala state” when the first Tamil de facto state that came out of the Vadukoddai Resolution under the leadership of Velupillai Prabhakaran ran a one-man dictatorship with the blessings of the Tamil leadership, both at home and in the Diaspora, obeying and backing every wish and command of the genocidal killer of Tamils ever in the history of Jaffna?

7. When will the Tamil leadership apologise to the Tamil people for misleading them in the post-independent era and re-position themselves into the real world of political possibilities, abandoning their unrealisable illusions?

In the post-independent period the Tamil leadership has survived in electoral politics essentially by blaming the Sinhala state”. They had never accepted responsibility for their crimes against their own people throughout their inhuman history which ended with Prabhakaran. And our pseudo-intellectuals in NGOs, academia and media – some of whom are in the pay of cash-rich NGOs — have gone along with their fake narrative of blaming the Sinhala state” for discrimination, etc. The final historical verdict at Nandikadal has proved that their narrative, based on selected events and interpretations of those events, was not only misleading but self-destructive. It caused so much pain without any gain. The Tamil leadership chose violence knowing the consequences, knowing the risks and knowing that the end result could not be guaranteed. 

Violence is not a force that can be managed or directed to serve the ends prescribed by political activists all the time.  Nor is it a remedy for all ills. It is a gamble that can bounce back and knock the best laid plans of political and military strategists. Once released violence can rise menacingly as the genie in the bottle. The power of violence can slip out of the hands of those who generated it and fall into the immature and untested hands of those who can rise on it and use it to destroy even the fathers of political violence who launched it. That is what happened in Vadukoddai. The children of the Vadukoddai Resolution turned their guns on the fathers who drafted it and read it aloud in Vadukoddai on May 14, 1976. In other words, the Tamil leadership was hoisted on their own petard. The violence they released to kill their hated bogeyman, the Sinhalese, boomeranged and blasted their own kith and kin and their bravado, rhetoric, arrogance, and politics of the impossible. In their folly, they had to go through a futile war to realise that they can co-exist in peace with all other communities in a united and indivisible Sri Lanka, if we are to believe the recent statements of R. Sampanthan, the outstanding leader of the Tamils.

They were not babes in the woods when they declared war in Vadukoddai. They knew that if they went for violence demanding separation the cost was going to be heavy. No one was going to give them their Eelam on a platter as they discovered after 33 years filled with tears. Drawn from the Sri Lankan experience, creating an exclusive ethnic enclave means ethnic cleansing, killing the other”, hunting and eliminating Tamil dissidents and rivals, recruiting forcibly even under-aged children when they run out of cadres, suppressing freedom of expression, association, independent judiciary and democratic institutions, running a one-man state, reneging on peace deals, and generally allocating more land for graveyards than agriculture or even the growth of Tamil culture. In short, separatism dependent on total violence for survival led to the total annihilation of democracy, liberty, freedom, denial of human dignity, respect for individual rights and, above all human rights. The only culture it facilitated was the gun culture and celebration of the enemies killed. Slaughtering the other” is raised to the highest level in the list of political honours. Receiving an honour from the Tamil killing machine was also valued highly by its loyalists. The glorification of the culture of Tamil violence came, in recent times, from the Vadukoddai Resolution.

Sampanthan was a very young and aspiring political leader in the making at Vadkoddai. He had traversed the distance from Vadukoddai to Nandikadal following the Vadukoddian ideology and its consequences without batting an eyelid. He is the most qualified and experienced Tamil leader to explain why the Vadukoddian ideology, methodology and deified iconology that failed. Or why it turned into Tamil fascism leving a bloody trail of death and destruction. He had seen it rise and fall. As the last of the Tamil Mohicans, should he not explain to the Tamil people what went wrong with the Tamil leadership of which he was a part? Or is he shy to admit the underlining veracity of Prof. Kumar David’s assertion that the Tamil leadership consists of congenital idiots”?

Even though the Vadukoddai ideology gave them a political peg to hang their hopes initially, they continued to hang to it even when they knew it was not taking their people anywhere. They hung on to it even when the first-born child, Velupillai Prabhakaran, that came out of it were humiliating, suppressing, oppressing and destroying their people. In the eyes of the Tamil separatists Vadukoddai Resolution became their Bible that legitimized Tamil political violence, abandoning of the non-violent democratic stream.  The war they launched and backed with all their local and international resources, ran, with intermittent breaks, for 33 years (from May 14, 1976 to May 19, 2009) until it was finally crushed on the banks of Nandikadal.

The Vadukoddai Resolution was a hand-made, home-made political declaration of the elitist Tamil leaders who narrated in it their version of history for declaring war. Their narrative was primarily aimed at justifying their declaration of war to establish a Tamil state, abandoning their cosmetic Gandhian non-violence that was hardly skin-deep. Prof. A. J. Wilson, the son-in-law of S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, the father of Tamil separatism, states that his father-in-law went through every word of the Vadukoddai declaration of war before it was presented to the Tamil leadership. In hindsight, it can be seen that it was the most irresponsible, ill-conceived criminal act that brought no body – the Tamils in particular in whose name the war was launched – any good.

Coincidentally, a parallel movement to that of the Vadukoddai Convention of May 14, 1976 – a movement that took on the militarised mission of establishing Eelam promised in the Vadukoddai Resolution – also surfaced in the same year and the same month. On May 5, 1976, nine days before the Vadukoddai Resolution, the Tamil New Tigers (TNT), one of the numerous Tamil militant groups, changed its name and was rechristened as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). It was a fateful month in which the Vadukoddai ideology of separatism found its juggernaut to take the Tamils to their elusive destination – an expectation that never materialised.

The Tamil leadership had also changed the name of their Tamil United Front (TUF) into Tamil United Liberation Front. (TULF). They endearingly embraced the Tamil militants as their boys”. They condoned, or justified, or covered up the crimes committed by the children of the Vadukoddai Resolution. The Tamil leadership, of course, stayed at a safe distance, still ensconced in the parliamentary seats of the state on which they had declared war.  In their preparations for war, the Tamil leadership was behind the front row chivvying the Tamil youth to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.

At this stage the Tamil leadership consisting of the traditional ruling Vellalas were on their last legs. Producing the Vadukoddai Resolution was their last chance of retaining their power in the peninsula. Their political objective and tactics were to achieve a state of their own. But they discovered that the so-called Gandhian politics had not taken them anywhere. The anti-Sinhala politics on which they had survived were pushing them to take the next inevitable step and go to war. The records confirm that the Tamil leadership made all the necessary preparations for the Vadukoddai war. They provided the ideology, the moral and material power, they internationalised it, they financed it, they manufactured propaganda to justify Tamil violence, they defended violations of international law and the rules of engagement in times of war. In fact, the Resolution assigned the specific tasks to (1) the Tamil elite at the top to prepare a plan of action and (2) the Tamil youth to implement it through the gun. But simultaneously they washed their hands off of any responsibility for the violence by blaming the Sri Lankan state and its Forces,

It was the ideological, moral and material support coming out of the Tamil leadership that helped the children of the Vadukoddai Resolution to pave the path for the emergence of a de facto state of sorts which was labelled as Eelam. It is the children born out of the Vadukoddai Resolution that produced the de facto state of Eelam – the first state of any shape or form for the Tamils in the post-colonial period. The Tamils constitute a collective of about 70 million globally of which nearly 55 million live in Tamil Nadu – the original and only homeland of the Tamils. Since there was no possibility of Tamil Nadu forming an independent state, all hopes were focused on carving out a state from the North and the East of Sri Lanka. But the overwhelming forces of history deemed it otherwise.

In participating and passing the Vadukoddai Resolution the Tamil leadership and their partners, both silent and active, played a critical role in preparing and planning to wage war. The Vadkoddai Resolution itself is a key document that testifies to the manufacture of hate politics propagated to initiate and wage war. The Vadukoddians (meaning those who were either active or silent partners of the Vadukoddai ideology) are primarily responsible for laying the foundations of the Tamil killing machine that was refined by the LTTE – the first-born children of the Vadukoddai Resolution.

The planning, initiating and reinforcing the infrastructure of the Tiger killing machine were under the leadership of the Vadukoddians who were either directly or indirectly partners in the crimes listed in the Nuremberg Charter. They were not low-level or middle-level perpetrators of violence. They were the crème de la crème of Tamil society who fathered Tamil violence. They defined, endorsed, financed and even defended in courts the crimes committed by their political children as commendable demonstrations  of Tamil heroism. It was the force of the Vadukoddai ideology that led to the massacres of Tamil rivals, dissidents, moderates, Muslims, Sinhalese and perceived enemies” like Rajiv Gandhi. The Vadukoddians are directly responsible for perfecting the killing machine of the Tamil Tigers. Without their financial, moral, international, political and legal support the Tigers could never have got to the place they occupied at the height of their power.

So in any analysis of the North-South armed conflict which lasted for 33 years what should be recognised first is that it is the Tamil leadership that declared war and committed the crime against peace”. It is the only Sri Lankan ethnic minority community, including their Tamils MPs, that officially declared war against the democratically elected state and their fellow citizens, with the sole objective of breaking up an internationally recognised state. It was ironical – or was it hypocritical? – for the Tamil MPs to be signatories to a declaration of war against the state of which they were MPs. They wanted to have it both ways, with one foot in each camp. As it happened, they had to depend eventually on the Sinhala state” to find protection – a state which they stated did not give security to the Tamils – when their Tamil de facto state was hunting them to eliminate them from the political equation.

The Tamils who were elated with the establishment of a Tamil state – though only a de facto one — were in a state of denial refusing to accept responsibility for the crimes committed by their state authorities. But it must be conceded that in going so far as a de facto state the Tamils reached the highest peak of their power. Their power not only threatened local territorial integrity but also regional stability. They were able to generate and sustain violence through the fascist grip that crushed the Tamils who were cowed down by Vadukoddian violence.

In the latter stages, even Anton Balasingham is on record saying that he could not convince his leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, to recognise the ground realities and settle for a peace agreement. It was too late when the Tamils realised that the monster they created at Vadukoddai had slipped out of their control. They could not manage their violence either for their own good or for their future. The cocky children of the Vadukoddai Resolution had over-extended themselves and, drunk with the arrogance of gun-power, decided to take on even India. They had installed all the key structures – a judiciary, army, navy, air force, an administration (no legislature though) – to qualify as a de facto state. The international community too had begun to treat them with some respect, particularly as stake holders of the peace process. But the peninsularity of the Jaffna jingoist mind blinded them. They could live only in their make-believe world of Tamil superiority. Their intransigence, arrogance and their self-destructive reliance on violence as the be-all and the end-all of politics dragged them, kicking and screaming, into the murky depths of Nandikadal.

This story ends by confirming that violence has never worked for any community. Sinhala violence of the JVP fascists, Tamil violence of the Tiger fascists and the Muslim violence of Islamic fascists have proved that terror and brutality can never provide a single solution to any community. Besides, violence, once it is released can go in many directions. It is unpredictable and the first victims can be those who released it.

That is the tragic story of the Vadukoddai Resolution.

Concluded.

President’s Media Division

Excellencies,

I thank the Prime Ministers of Canada and Jamaica and the Secretary General of the United Nations for convening this meeting. Global trade, tourism, investments and employment have come to a standstill. The pandemic has suddenly disrupted once sustainable businesses and economies, to unsustainable state of affairs. Countries which have been systematically reducing fiscal deficit have seen a reverse as real economy is no longer income and employment generating.

Debt which has also been on a declining trend has seen a corresponding reversal. Banking is getting a hit as non-performing assets have risen and confronted with a liquidity crisis. Entire Saving – Investment equation has collapsed and this is why financing of development is a topic of relevance to the global economy.

In Sri Lanka main transmission channels through labour income, export related income, tourism and connected services have impacted our real economy. Loss of employment and livelihood is large. Whatever the difficulties we have confronted our policy of people first” cannot be compromised as human development is the only asset we value most. As this is a crisis beyond the control of government and business, international support by way of unconditional budget support and compensatory debt deferment facilities for official debt will have to come from multilateral and bilateral official lenders so that private debt and equity markets will not lose confidence.

The multilateral and bilateral official creditors to developing countries have a special responsibility to be innovative in creating such space for developing world to revive their economies and should not insist on normal conditionalities of lending, after all, most countries have honoured their debt obligations and time has come to provide new space through a decent haircut by official creditors. Our priority to develop agriculture and food security, environment conservation, renewable energy resources, digital economy and digital governance, rural economy and poverty reduction, market access to people and business community, through improved connectivity to villages and creating green cities in line with our environment conservation strategies suffered a setback with almost 2 months lockdown in the economy.

We have taken steps to ease restrictions from this week while keeping health quarantine standards to ensure community will not be vulnerable to COVID-19 health risks. However as two months loss in the real economy and likely time line to reach normalcy will be longer, external funding must be development centric” by all aspects of such facilities. The profiling of official debt and medium term emergency budget support loans by each major bilateral and multilateral lenders will not only provide macroeconomic space to meet private debt obligations and relax trade and payments systems but also restore confidence among private sector creditors to re-energise growth and investments.

I underscored the need for development financing when I spoke with His Excellency Xi Jinping, President of People’s Republic of China, India Prime Minister Hon. Narendra Modi and US National Security Advisor Mr. Robert O’Brien. It is noted that Middle Income Countries seem to get subsumed under the overarching classification of developing countries and thereby their requirements are not wholly met. The fast actions by large bilateral, multilateral agencies without placing conditionalities among themselves and coming forward as development partners in respective developing and middle income economies is the responsibility of leading agencies and leaders of the world.

This dialogue must concentrate on how developing and middle income countries are assisted with emergency funding facility, while encouraging countries to focus on human development aspect including education, health, women and children, new export industries, food security and environment for a better and stable world. Excellencies, I conclude recalling the words of the Buddha arogya parama labha”, meaning good health is the greatest gain.

Thank you.

President’s Media Division 28.05.2020

Embassy of Sri Lanka 

Courtesy Adaderana

The President’s Media Division announced that island-wide curfew will be imposed on May 31 as well as on June 04 and June 05.

Issuing an updated notice on the curfew, the PMD that the curfew will be effective in the island till Saturday, June 6th and afterwards as follows:

Curfew will be in force island-wide throughout the day on Sunday, (May 31st).

Curfew will be effective in all the districts from Monday, (June 01st) to Wednesday, (June 3rd) only between 10.00pm to 4.00am daily as before.

Curfew will be in force island-wide on Thursday, (June 4th) and Friday, (June 5th).

From Saturday, (June 6th) onwards curfew will be effective in all the districts, as before, from 10.00pm to 4.00am daily until further notice.

Travel between districts will be allowed except in Colombo and Gampaha districts, the PMD said.

Courtesy Adaderana

Six more people have tested positive for Covid-19 in Sri Lanka increasing the tally of confirmed cases reported in the country 1,530.

This brings the total number of new cases identified within Thursday (May 29) to 61. 

Today’s confirmed cases include 18 returnees from Kuwait who are under quarantine in Trincomalee, 17 returnees from Dubai who are quarantined at Giragama and 26 navy personnel.

A total of 775 patients infected with Covid-19 are currently being treated at selected hospitals while Sri Lanka’s recoveries has increased to 745.

21 new cases of Covid-19 brings total to 1,524

Twenty-one new cases of Coronavirus have been identified increasing the total number of cases reported thus far in Sri Lanka to 1,524.

A total of 55 new cases of COVID-19 have been reported so far within today (28). 

This includes 17 persons who had returned from Kuwait and are under quarantine in Trincomalee and another 17 Sri Lankans who had returned from Dubai and are currently under quarantine in Giragama.

The remaining 21 patients are navy personnel. Among them are 17 from a quarantine center in Jaffna and 2 from Mullaitivu. The other two navy personnel are also under quarantine.

The total number of COVID-19 cases reported in Sri Lanka has increased to 1,524 while 769 of them are currently under medical care. The number of recoveries stands at 745.

COVID-19: Total case count passes 1,500 mark

The total number of COVID-19 infections reported in the country has surpassed the 1,500th mark, confirmed the Department of Government Information.

This is with 17 persons who had been undergoing quarantine at the Giragama quarantine facility upon return from Dubai testing positive for the COVID-19 virus.

Accordingly, a total of 34 cases have been reported in the country within the day so far. Fifteen of them had arrived from Kuwait and been undergoing quarantine at the Trincomalee quarantine center while the other 2 are Sri Lanka Navy personnel.

The total number of cases reported in the country is at 1,503 patients.

Sri Lanka witnessed the highest daily surge of virus cases on Wednesday (27), with a record total of 150 new infections. Out of these cases, 97 were returnees from overseas at quarantine facilities while 53 were navy personnel under quarantine.

Currently, 748 active cases are under medical care at selected hospitals across the country, as per the Epidemiology Unit.

15 returnees test positive for COVID-19; Confirmed cases hike to 1,486

Fifteen more persons have tested positive for COVID-19, bringing Sri Lanka’s infections tally to 1,486 as of 5.15 pm today (28).

These fresh cases are returnees from Kuwait who are being quarantined in Trincomalee.

COVID-19 infections confirmed so far today moved up to 17, as two virus-positive navy men were also identified earlier this evening.

According to the Epidemiology Unit’s tally, 448 persons – including 3 foreigners – who arrived in the country from overseas have contracted the virus so far.

In the meantime, the count of recoveries reported in the country reached 745 after 13 patients were discharged from hospitals earlier today.

This brings the number of active coronavirus cases who are under medical care to 731.

Sri Lanka reported its 10th death on Monday (25) as a 51-year-old woman who had arrived in the country from Kuwait succumbed to the disease.

Two fresh COVID-19 cases bring count to 1,471

Two more persons have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, increasing the number of COVID-19 cases reported in the country.

The Ministry of Health stated that the two latest infections have been detected among the Sri Lanka Navy personnel.

Thereby, the total number of coronavirus cases detected in the country has jumped to 1,471.

Sri Lanka witnessed the highest daily surge of virus cases on Wednesday (27), with a record total of 150 new infections. Out of these cases, 97 were returnees from overseas at quarantine facilities while 53 were navy personnel under quarantine.

The number of active coronavirus cases who are currently under medical care stands at 716, according to the Epidemiology Unit’s tally.

In the meantime, Sri Lanka has reported 745 recoveries from the virus.

Sri Lanka reported its 10th death on Monday (25) as a 51-year-old woman who had arrived in the country from Kuwait succumbed to the disease.

Courtesy Adaderana

The United National Party (UNP) Working Committee is scheduled to meet tomorrow (29) to decide on the suspending of the party membership of over 100 UNP members who had handed over nominations from the ‘Samagi Jana Balawegaya’.

However, the General Secretary of the SJB Ranjith Madduma Bandara today stated that the ‘Samagi Jana Balawegaya’ was established with the approval of the UNP Working Committee and that therefore this was not in violation of the party constitution.

UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe has informed in writing to 102 members of the UNP who had handed over nominations from the ‘Samagi Jana Balawegaya’ that their party membership will be suspended effective immediately.

UNP General Secretary Akila Viraj Kariyawasam stated that as per the party’s constitution prior permission needs to be obtained from the Working Committee before handing over nominations through another political party and that, however none of these members had obtained prior approval in writing. 

Former Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa and other senior figures of the United National Party are among the members whose party membership has been suspended while they have been given 07 days to show cause.

However, the UNP Working Committee is set to meet tomorrow morning to decide on this matter.  

From 150 Tamils living in Canada prior to 1983, just over 35 years later, Tamils in Canada constitute close to 300,000 or more counting the illegals. Official statistics as per 2016 census claim 157,000 Tamils living in Canada with 122,000 in Toronto. Toronto holds the largest Tamil speaking population outside Asia, while Montreal holds the record for Tamil being the most spoken South Asian language beating even Bengali, Punjabi & Urdu and the 3^rdmost spoken South Asian language in Canada. Toronto & Montreal have since 1990 at least 10 weekly language newspapers as well as radio stations and 3 language tv stations! Since fall of LTTE and Prabakaran, a plethora of Tamil organizations have mushroomed. Tamils are setting a name for themselves in Canada and able to lobby and redefine what Canada thinks about Tamils. Sooner than later, Tamils will be dictating to the White Canadians in what we hope will become the realization of a Tamil Eelam in Canada. Not bad for 35 years!

The white Canadians have re-written history and continue to re-write history usurping the indigenous rights of those that lived before the arrival of the white colonial’s. Well, what do you know the Eelam Tamils are also re-writing history, so naturally they have much in common. The start of this effort is to coerce via lobbying the House of Commons to declare January as Tamil Heritage Month.Hurray – so the first step to re-writing Canada’s history as per Eelam Tamil doctrine commenced with the ‘Tamil Heritage Month Act 2014’.

Tamil Eelam in Canada’s story will begin by ‘recognizing contributions that Tamil-Canadians have made to Canadian society, the richness of the Tamil culture, language, traditions and the importance of educating and reflecting upon Tamil heritage for future generations’. Tamil Eelam Canada first step sealed. Congratulations.

The plan looks obvious enough though the White Canadians have not picked it up. The incremental increase in tempo has made enviable progress and return on investment. The powerful lobby groups are creating magic at municipal, provincial and federal levels extending internationally too. Eelam Tamils have strategically placed themselves inside every mainstream political party across the globe. In Canada, within just 3 decades they are calling the shots inside the Liberal Party, New Democratic Party & Conservative Party. It is likely they will make major legislative changes in their favor too.

It was in 2011 that Rathika Sitsabaiesan was eleced as a MP representing the New Democratic Party in Scarborough-Rouge River. Logan Kanapathi was elected as a councilor in Markham. Rathika in 2014 was bold enough to stand to commemorate Tamil Heroes Day, which honours fallen Tamil Tigers rebels and even went on to equate it to the Remembrance Day that Canadians honour their fallen Canadian heroes.” And she got away with it too! Only Canada’s Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney demanded an apology as LTTE had been banned by Canada since 2006!

These Tamil Canadians even got Parliamentary Secretary of Foreign Affairs & International Human Rights Deepak Obhrai to place a wreath for LTTE fallen heroes! Now that is a major achievement.

Inspite of LTTE being banned in Canada LTTE Heroes Day is commemorated in Markham with full LTTE paraphernalia.

Tamils are making the white nations & their officials dance to their tune. Just look at the statements by people in position praising the entity defeated in May 2009. Would Al Qaeda be able to do the same – no way.

We must feel proud of these Eelam Tamil organizations for their ability to get these international figureheads to deliver such statements. We look in awe at how they have managed to get even Prime Ministers, Opposition Leaders, high profile personalities of countries to attend their events and make statements and speeches against a sovereign country. That is a remarkable achievement. They are so inspired by these Eelam Tamils and want to somehow give them an Eelam …. Give it first in Canada, we say.

Political correctness and multiculturalism have provided bonus points and the loopholes. Anything they do is game so long as you master the art of using political correctness and multiculturalism to your advantage. In most areas where Tamils reside, it doesn’t look like Canada but mini Tamil Nadu. Tamil Eelam ethos is slowly but surely taking shape. What more when restaurants have photos of Prabakaran! You won’t find this anywhere in a country that has banned LTTE!

The issue is obviously not getting drilled into Canada as yet. They may like to look at the tragedy that has befallen Belgium, France and Britain where the whites are likely to soon be in the minority! Let’s also not forget that the whites are a fast dwindling group! Ironically, they are outsourcing their powers to the world’s mischief makers! Good for them!

Eelam Tamils have made sure they cover all corners of Canadian polity – making a mark and name for themselves and grabbing attention across the propaganda platforms – from blood donations, walkathons, helping sick kids, the aged – these have provided super cover to camouflage their other insidious local and international networks. Involving themselves in many charities provides good enough reason to float the slogan ‘how can they be involved in terrorism … they do so much for Canadian society’ and this is exactly the purpose of these initiatives.

Look at all those issuing statements for Tamil Eelam National Day May 2020 – Andrea Howarth, Peter Mackay, John Tory, Patrick Brown, Doly Begum, Jagmeet Singh.

There’s a whole list of Canadians supporting Tamil Eelam.

Bonnie Crombie, Mayor of Mississauga issuing statement for Tamil Memorial Day!

Brampton City Council Mayor Patrick Brown declared May 18 as the City’s Remembrance Day of Tamil Genocide – keep going until the ‘genocide’ term gets backfired on Canada too!  Today it will be Tamil Genocide Education Bill 104” —- we cannot wait till enough Tamils are placed in prominent roles to bring legislation that will undoubtedly shock the Canadians!

We’ve also not forgotten the purposely left out ‘Sinhala New Year’ by the Canadian Prime Minister. But that’s alright if that is what it costs for Tamil Eelam in Canada, by all means leave out the Sinhalese!

So, back home we should be really happy with the progress Eelam Tamils are making in taking the whites and playing them at their own game. This template appears to be applied elsewhere too — the Eelam lobby is powerful in UK, France, Australia and other parts of Europe and when self-determination for a Tamil Homeland was called in both Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, who says it should not be sought in Canada, Australia and Europe too…we’re keeping the crackers!

Canada has plenty of land to declare Eelam too.

Sri Lanka’s Northern provinces is just 8,884 km² – Toronto Canada (where 122,000 Tamils live) covers 630.2 km² while entire Canada consists of 9.985 million km²

You will hardly find 50 people gathered demanding Eelam in Sri Lanka nowadays but just look at the enthusiasm by the LTTE diaspora overseas and none of them will even dream of packing their bags to reside in either Tamil Nadu or Sri Lanka, so ideally the Eelam if at all should end up legally established where they are strategically operating from.

Kudos to them… even with the best of diplomats, we have not been able to get any white man to utter anything more than the usual stiff upper lip statements but just look at the progress being made by the LTTE lobby — who would have thought even self-righteous Navi Pillay would come out of the woodwork and drum for Eelam.

Our wishes to the LTTE Diaspora and look forward to them passing more Bills in Canada and carving out Toronto as Tamil Eelam very soon.

Imagine the day the Maple Flower becomes Gloriosa Lily (LTTE flower)

It’s been a piece of cake so far. The rebel Tigers said they admired Canada’s system because it includes mechanisms for self-determination such as the 1995 Quebec referendum on sovereignty. This will decide Tamil Eelam in Canada – we Sri Lankans wish them success.

Shenali D Waduge

By M D P DISSANAYAKE

It is time for Sri Lanka to expand its own, but neglected land resources.   Katchatheevu Island, currently positioned with a landmark of St Anthony’s Church, should be developed as an economic hub specialised in the health sector for local and international travelers seeking health services at an affordable price. 

The Changi was a neglected island near Singapore, a swampland infested with malaria mosquito and jungle, but today represents a standout economic center with its Changi International AirPort.

Katchtheevu Island should also be progressively developed with a master plan to meet the future needs of the region. 

In the current Covid 19 situation, Sri Lanka should undertake development tasks to set up an International Health Hub-Stage I, with a view of accommodating the needs, where treatments are needed in an isolated location. 

In the recent past HIV, SARS ( SEVERE ACUTE RESPIRATORY SYNDROME__), EBOLA, hemorrhagic fever, and Nipah virus encephalitis and now Covid 19, wherewith the emergence of each of virus, the international health sectors and researchers take up the role of Fire Fighters.   In the future, various researchers have found the likely emergence of new viruses, both human and non-human.

In the forward planning process, looking into niche markets, Sri Lanka is in an ideal situation to develop Katchatheevu Island to non-traditional foreign exchange sources as well.

Courtesy Hindustan Times

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa had sought the currency swap facility from India, in addition to $400 million that Colombo had sought under the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) framework, during a telephone conversation with PM Modi on May 23.

Days after Colombo sought a $1.1 billion currency swap facility from New Delhi to boost foreign currency reserves amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told his Sri Lankan counterpart Mahinda Rajapaksa that India stands ready to extend all possible support”.

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa sought the currency swap facility, in addition to $400 million the country has sought from India under the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) framework, during a telephone conversation with Modi on May 23.

Modi spoke on Wednesday with Mahinda Rajapaksa to congratulate him on completing 50 years since first entering Sri Lanka’s Parliament. He recalled Mahinda Rajapaska’s contributions to Sri Lanka’s development and wished him the best for his future.

The leaders discussed the health and economic impact of the prevailing Covid-19 pandemic and the measures being taken in the two countries to counter them. Prime Minister assured H.E. Rajapaksa that India stands ready to extend all possible support to Sri Lanka during this challenging time,” the external affairs ministry said in a readout.

Modi also conveyed his condolences at the sudden demise of Arumugan Thondaman, a prominent leader of Indian-origin Tamils in Sri Lanka, on Tuesday. He recalled Thondaman’s role in taking forward the development partnership between the two countries.

Sri Lanka has been battered by the pandemic, which has led to the complete drying up of revenues from tourism, one of the mainstays of the economy. China’s development bank provided a $500 million loan to Sri Lanka in March to bolster the country’s official reserves.

Courtesy Blue Swan Daily

Sri Lanka‘s COVID-19 Prevention Task Force Committee reportedly submitted a proposal to Sri Lanka’s President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to permit Sri Lankan airports to resume handling international tourist arrivals from 01-Aug-2020 (Colombo Page/Lanka Business Online/Daily Mirror, 26/27-May-2020). As previously reported by CAPA, scheduled arriving international passenger services have been prohibited in Sri Lanka since 19-Mar-2020.

Courtesy Adaderana

Eighty-one more individuals have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, confirmed the Ministry of Health.

The new cases jump the count of coronavirus cases reported in Sri Lanka to 1,453.

All 81 cases are reported among persons who are undergoing quarantine upon arriving in the country from overseas.

Previously today (27), 53 Sri Lanka Navy personnel were reported to have contracted the virus.

Accordingly, 134 new cases have been detected in the country within the day.

On that account, the number of active coronavirus cases who are under medical care stands at 711 according to the Epidemiology Unit’s tally.

In the meantime, the coronavirus recoveries reported in the country reached 732 earlier today as 20 patients were discharged from the Infectious Disease Hospital (02), Welikanda Base Hospital (01), Colombo East Base Hospital (05), Navy Hospital (10) and Minuwangoda Base Hospital (02).

Sri Lanka witnessed the highest daily surge of virus cases on Tuesday (26), with a record total of 137 new infections. Out of these cases, 127 were returnees from Kuwait who are at quarantine facilities while 10 of them were navy personnel, who are also under quarantine. Accordingly, a total of 288 persons who returned from overseas have tested positive for the virus so far.

Sri Lanka reported its 10th death on Monday (25) as a 51-year-old woman who had arrived in the country from Kuwait succumbed to the disease.

Courtesy Adaderana

General Secretary of the United National Party (UNP) Akila Viraj Kariyawasam says letters have been directed to party members who signed nomination papers for the forthcoming General from other political parties, demanding reasons for their conduct.

Kariyawasam mentioned this releasing a statement on suspending the membership of UNP members who have violated the party’s constitution.

None of the UNP members who signed nomination papers for the impending election from other political parties has sought the written permission of the Working Committee, Kariyawasam pointed out.

Stressing that this is a clear violation of the party’s constitution, Kariyawasam says the leadership of the UNP hence decided to take action against the members who have done so.

UNP General Secretary further stated that the explanations and appeals of such members pertaining to the matter will be taken up at the upcoming meeting of the Working Committee and necessary actions will be determined.

Courtesy Hiru News

Archaeological officials say they were threatened with death while marking the boundaries of the historic Devanagala sacred area.

After the CIA revealed the illegal acquiring of lands around the sacred area, officials who visited the area made a public statement of these threats for the first time.

Courtesy Hiru News

The hearing of the petitions filed before the Supreme Court challenging the date of the general election have been postponed until tomorrow.

This was when the hearing was conducted for the 7^th day before the Bench comprising of Chief Justice Jayantha Jayasuriya and Justices Buwaneka Aluvihare, Sisira de Abrew, Priyantha Jayawardena and Vijith Malalgoda

Additional Solicitor General Indika Demuni De Silva, who appeared on behalf of the Attorney General, completed her submissions today.

President’s Counsel Manohara de Silva appearing on behalf of Prof. Pandula Addagama who filed an Intervenient petition in to these fundamental rights petitions, made his submissions

He said the President’s dissolution of Parliament and the gazette issued on March 2 were legal.

Pointing out that there was no legal provision to revoke the gazette, the President’s counsel emphasised that there is no legal provision to hold elections within three months and summon parliament from the date of the dissolution of parliament.

Similarly, he also stated that although the petitioners have called for the reconvening of the dissolved parliament, there is no provision in the Constitution to take such a step.

Attorney-at-Law Manohara de Silva said that the supreme court had recently stated that the election commission can decide independently on setting the date of the election.

Therefore, he noted that it is surprising that the Election Commission has asked for more time to set the dates for the general election and for the issuance of preferential numbers.

He stated that it would raise a doubt whether the Election Commission and the petitioners have jointly worked together to postpone the general election.

President’s Counsel Uditha Igalahewa appearing for an intervenient party stated that there are contradictions in the facts presented in the petitions by the petitioners

He also questioned how the Parliament could be reconvened if the gazette proclamation by the President regarding the dissolution of parliament is revoked.

The Attorney emphasized that a Parliament which is dissolved by the President cannot be recalled except under the exceptional circumstances specified in the Constitution.

Thereafter the hearing of the petitions was postponed until 10.00 am tomorrow and the lawyers appearing for the intervenient petitioners are due to make their submissions tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Attorney-at-Law Nishara Jayaratne stated that three comprehensive reports on the collective action taken by the Government under the leadership of the President to control the covid 19 pandemic was submitted to the Supreme Court yesterday and today on behalf of the Attorney General.

Post-War Sri Lanka: Fractured and unjust for Tamils’ is the article appearing on TheDiplomat by Visvajit Sriramrajan on 15 May 2020. The article is replete in conjecture, abound in unsubstantiated allegations and completely distorting the situation in Sri Lanka. We presume readers who have little or no background knowledge of Sri Lanka will be misled by such propaganda//disinformation and wish to correct the distortions allowing people to question these lies with counter arguments and balanced reasoning.

Questions posed to Visvajit Sriramrajan

·     You speak of a Mullaivaikkal massacre of nearly 50,000 Tamils – while all LTTE were Tamils, all Tamils were not LTTE so we would like to ask you, whether you are referring to the massacre of LTTE or civilians? If civilians, provide data of names of the dead or at least a police complaint by their families. If LTTE, they were given 3 chances to lay down arms and surrender but they rejected and declared they would fight till their last man. In an armed conflict, the two parties battled it out and one side lost and the other side won. 

·     You say the Tamils are discriminated – please provide examples where legislatively and constitutionally Tamils are discriminated where legislatively and constitutionally the majority is not. Give examples where only Tamils exclusively are discriminated because they are Tamils 

·     You say that Tamils have been subjugated because of Gotabaya Rajapakse coming to power – he has been in power not even 6 months. Can you please cite where and how Tamils have been subjugated? Let us know so we can look into this

·     You say Rajapakse’s ‘orchestrated the Tamil genocide’ – wow, you are using genocide term which has a major connotation. Can you then explain how Tamil population is increasing if there is supposed to be ‘genocide’ of Tamils! This is really a strange scenario to understand. 

·     You say there is ‘high level of militarization’ in the North & East – can you please provide some previous articles of yours complaining about LTTE running a defacto state in the very areas you now claim are being militarized? Did you have no issue with LTTE ruling the areas with their guns?

·     You are making major statements and we hope that you can substantiate these with facts and evidence sans sensationalism. 

·     You say Tamils are reprimanded for commemorating their deceased – correction. Tamils are prohibited from commemorating LTTE because LTTE is banned – would US allow open commemoration of Bin Laden? Besides didn’t LTTE prohibit Tamil mothers commemorating Tamil militant group members that LTTE killed? Wasn’t Mahaveer Naal only for LTTE war heroes and not to commemorate members of other Tamil militant groups that LTTE killed? Hope you can provide a response to this. LTTE remains banned in Sri Lanka, India, US, UK, EU and 32 countries still.

·     You mentioned ‘enforced disappearances’ – now isn’t it strange that the Presidential Commission on Missing Persons has received only 23,586 complaints of missing covering period from 1983 and out of this 23,586 missing 5000 are missing soldiers … so now where is your hundreds and thousands of missing??? Surely, if they were missing their names should have been logged.

·     The crocodile story of Tamils being bed to the crocodiles another classic case of imagination going wild – you should seriously think twice about listening to that former minister who apparently had hired 2 convicts to disguise themselves and appear on tv and were paid to lie. There’s an ongoing court case against them now! Pl follow that and by the way can you also tell us where these 2 paid convicts said that Tamils were fed to crocodiles – we cannot remember these 2 stating that…. Hope you include this in your next article. 

·      You say Sri Lanka has not been tried for ‘heinous war crimes’ can you first give evidence of crimes – its been 11 years now and you people drum war crimes but produce some names of the supposed to be 40,000 dead (give a list of their names – then we can check if they were born even) you can even say 1million killed by it means nothing if there are no evidence of dead with at least a dead body. But the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission did declare 22,247 LTTE dead (now you cannot put this number as civilian) 

·      You seriously have to get your facts straight – Easter Sunday mass murder resulted in over 300 innocent people getting killed. It was a Christian/Catholic event – why should Sinhala Buddhists go attacking anyone for murders taking place inside churches and hotels?

·      You mention the burning of the Jaffna Library in 1981 – well the UNP leader apologized for it as it was done by UNP thugs but Tamils have no problem in voting for UNP and continue to do so. So much for the anger for burning the library. The LTTE attacked the sacred Sri Maha Bodhi killing 146 worshipping Buddhists in 1986. LTTE also attacked Kattankudy mosque in 1990 killing 147 Muslims praying. LTTE also attacked the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy in 1998.

·      You speak of vandalism and property demolition – have you taken stock of how many Tamil houses the LTTE took over from Tamils who did not support LTTE? Did you also do up a list of Tamils killed by LTTE starting from 1975 with the assassination of Jaffna Mayor Alfred Duraiappah. How about the assassination of Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, by LTTE – he was also a Tamil! You appear to suffer selective memory! We can provide you a very long list of Tamils killed by LTTE but this excludes the LTTE and other Tamil militant groups killed by LTTE for defying orders — on top of that list would be Mahaththaya who was LTTE deputy leader, killed by Prabakaran after much torture! 

·      Given that you are clueless about the ancient heritage and archaeological Buddhist sites in the North and East of Sri Lanka, this would require another essay to provide all details. Simply parroting what propagandists say does not help at all. What needs to be added is that no one is looking down on Tamil culture in fact there are plenty of Sinhalese who respect the Hindu gods & take part in Hindu events.

·      Sorry to correct you again – Sri Lanka’s conflict was no civil war – it was a terrorist conflict proved by the fact that LTTE killed scores of Tamils including foreigners.

·      A fact that none many wishes to acknowledge is that after LTTE defeat when Tamils discovered Prabakaran’s parents in their 80s were about to be attacked and the Sri Lankan Army had to remove them to safety – when they died later none of Prabakarans children or anyone in the LTTE attended the funeral. This was how they treated the parents of Prabakaran! The State looked after and fed them till they died.

·      Good that you raised the question of funds. As per Janes Intelligence LTTE was making $300m annual profits as far back as 2004 – how many roads, schools, libraries, parks did LTTE build? We can show you that LTTE built plenty of bunkers but did not even provide electricity to people of the Vanni who got electricity for the first time after almost 25 years with the end of the conflict. 

·      You should really look at how North looked under LTTE that ruled it since 1980s and what North looks like now after the defeat of LTTE – its an amazing place, so beautiful and blooming. The farmers are growing vegetables and fruits and people are getting on with their lives. Only people like you are feeding lies and crocodile jokes!

·      The extent of your lies is unbelievable. Citing isolated cases and creating lies. We too can make a fuss about paid advertisement by Tamils saying only Tamils to respond for renting/lease of houses! How discriminatory is that. This too was removed after raising complaint.

·      There was no such act called Sinhala Only Act. The Official Language Act of 1956 which was to come into effect only in 1964. It was to address the historical grievances of the Sinhalese and had nothing to do with Tamils. Besides can you prove that Tamil language had official status administratively under colonial rule from 1505 onwards? Only then can you claim a grievance to Tamil language. Sinhalese was used prior to that as state language and that got changed after colonial take over. This was what was being addressed in 1956.

·      You speak of Tamils as inferior —- thank you for the opportunity to highlight to the readers how the same PM in 1957 brought the Social Disabilities Act enabling low caste Tamils to gain education. What did the elite and high class/caste Tamil leaders do – they travelled all the way to London by ship to beg the British to disallow the act. So who didn’t want their own people to gain education? The Tamils. Please read about this and find out the truth for yourselves. These same Tamil leaders even begged the British to encode caste into the electoral system. They wanted their own people to remain low caste, poor and uneducated. Today, they have the audacity to refer to the Sinhalese as discriminating them. This is so because they want to hide what they did and continue to do to their own people via the caste system. 

·      You speak of Tamils receiving government letters in Sinhalese – well hello, we too have received letters in Tamil… but we don’t go complaining to the world for administrative hiccups

·      We would really love to accept your Mullaivaikkal massacre fairytale if it comes with some sort of believable evidence – like the names of the supposed to be dead. Let’s see that happening first. Without proof of dead bodies, no dead persons names, no skeletons — just wailing ‘massacre’ ‘genocide’ are people so stupid to believe. Any rational thinking person’s automatically want to have facts and statistics and evidence. The mystery to us is why you people are not providing this.

The editors of TheDiplomat, we hope your media ethics include asking the fundamental question – how believable are these stories. Why not ask yourself, if genocide is supposed to have been committed, there must be a major reduction in Tamil population. Just check the statistics. There is no such reduction. How fair is it to provide podium for lies? 

The crocodile story really takes the cake! But this is no laughing matter. No entities can be allowed to drum lies and ridicule a country and denigrate its armed forces. LTTE killed Sinhalese, Muslims, Tamils and even Foreigners. We can provide long lists of the LTTE killings and the LTTE attacks on public property. 

How come this author has not touched on the freedom that Sri Lanka provided to the Tamil children who were kidnapped by LTTE from their parents and turned into brutal murderers. These children were denied their fundamental rights to education and to obtain the love of their parents. Their entire youth and childhood was robbed by LTTE. 

On 18 May 2009 with LTTE’s defeat, the Tamil children were saved from becoming child soldiers. Their parents did not have to fear their children would get kidnapped. They didn’t have to hide them in underground bunkers inside their homes. This itself was a major victory for Tamils. No one has yet counted how many Tamil children LTTE killed by turning them into child soldiers. No one in Tamil Diaspora are speaking for these LTTE child soldiers because they were plucked from poor and low caste homes and their parents were too poor and too afraid to complain against the LTTE. They cried their loss of loved one’s alone. But today, the 594 child soldiers that surrendered in May 2009 to the Army were given a presidential pardon and returned to school. They held a pen instead of a gun and they were guided to find their paths in life. They have become artists, farmers, singers and actors. Gokulan is the singing sensation that all Sri Lankans love – he was a former child soldier. He lost his 2 brothers to LTTE and his sister was also recruited by LTTE during the last stages but thankfully she survived and has returned to her family. 

We can provide enough of happy stories for readers than the jokes of crocodile lies by this author.

https://thediplomat.com/2020/05/post-war-sri-lanka-fractured-and-unjust-for-tamils/

Shenali D Waduge

H. L. D. Mahindapala

May 14, 1976 is one of the most underreported, underestimated, underexamined dates in the political calendar of independent Sri Lanka. It was the date on which the Tamil leadership which had gathered in Vadukoddai passed a resolution declaring war against the democratically elected state demanding a separate state. Stitching bits and pieces of selected events from here and there, they painted their version of history which consisted of highly controversial accusations to demonise the Sinhala-state” – their terminology to stigmatise the democratically elected state as a racist entity with no space for the minorities, particularly the Tamils. So shedding copious tears for the Tamils, the Vadukoddai Declaration of War urged the Tamil youth to take up arms and never rest until they had achieved Tamil Eelam – a political haven of the Tamils, by the Tamils for the Tamils.

The call to take up arms was declared in the last two paragraphs of the Vadukoddai Resolution. It said: This Convention directs the Action Committee of the TAMIL UNITED LIBERATION FRONT to formulate a plan of action and launch without undue delay the struggle for winning the sovereignty and freedom of the Tamil Nation;

And this Convention calls upon the Tamil Nation in general and the Tamil youth in particular to come forward to throw themselves fully into the sacred fight for freedom and to flinch not till the goal of a sovereign state of TAMIL EELAM is reached.”

In these two concluding paragraphs the Tamil leadership assembled at Vadukoddai called upon the Action Committee  to formulate a plan of action” for the Tamil youth in particular to take up arms, abandoning their pretensions of being a non-violent movement. And from 1976 onwards both the Tamil elders and the Tamils youth followed the declared objective of winning the sovereignty and freedom of the Tamil Nation” through violence. It was a clear and decisive declaration to pursue a military course of action to achieve political goals This was the primary message delivered by the Tamil leadership to the Tamil people. It was the fateful day on which the Tamil leadership made their biggest political gamble by deciding to abandon the non-violent, democratic mainstream and go down the path of violence. They decided to change the course of history – and their destiny — with violence. They invested everything they had in pursuing violence and failed. Failed miserably!

Throughout the post-independent decades, the ageing Tamil leadership had pushed Tamil communalism to the extreme end and by May 14, 1976 the force of events generated by them had cornered them. They discovered rather late that the consistent, unrelenting and massive political campaigns they had whipped up, blaming everything on the Sinhala state” in the post-independent phase, had not gone in the direction they had wanted. Their aim was to divide Sri Lanka into two states – a task which they set out achieve with the typical Tamil arrogance boosted by historical distortions, political fictions, and anti-Sinhala-Buddhist venom. They had raised the hopes of the Jaffnaites overestimating their peninsular power and underestimating the consolidated historical forces that had created, built and sustained the nation over the ages.

By 1976 the false expectations they generated had risen to fever pitch and the internal forces – mainly, the Tamil youth — that rose with the high expectations had gone as far as they could and reached the end of their political tether. The Tamil youth were impatient and rebelling against the conservative and failed Tamil leadership demanding a change of course. The internal dynamics within the peninsula had gathered a momentum which demanded instant solutions. Eelam remained in the Never-Never land, elusive as ever. The hate politics of mono-ethnic Tamil extremism, targeting the Sinhala-Buddhists of the South, had gone too far to a point of no return, leaving no room for peaceful co-existence. Any moves for compromises were decried by one or the other Tamil party as surrender to the Sinhalese. Following Jinnah’s partioning of India the Tamil leadership declared that the marriage of partnership was over. They were determined to go for divorce which in their desperate circumstances seems to be the only way out.

In the Vadukoddai Resolution the Tamil leadership was throwing not a challenge but an ultimatum to the Sinhala state”. Pumped up by their mono-ethnic rhetoric, wrapped in mythologies, they were hoping to force their way into Eelam. The plan of the Tamil elders was to make use of the Tamil youth to pull their political chestnuts out.  In the process, they had painted themselves into a mono-ethnic extremity from which they could not get out except through violence. They were determined to dissolve the marriage made by the gods of geography and history. All what they needed was a public declaration justifying the hate politics of the North for them to declare war. The Vadukoddai Resolution was introduced to spell out the reasons why they refused to coexist. Demanding disproportionate shares of positions (particularly in the government service), power in the legislatures, privileges enshrined in the various constitutions and, most of all, territories as ethnic enclaves they had pushed themselves into a self-destructive political extremity. It led them to mono-ethnic politics, excluding the other”.  With this agenda they had nowhere else to go except to embrace violence.  This confirms the proposition that separatism and violence are inseparable.

It was amidst these overwhelming pressures that the Tamil leadership met in Vadukoddai and gave the official nod for the Tamil youth to take up arms against the elected state of Sri Lanka, hoping to ride on their backs to the seats of power in Eelam. The old Tamil leadership did not realise at this stage that they were handing over their traditional power, which they had wielded from feudal times, into the hands of the untried, untested and inexperienced Tamil youth. The immature Tamil youth who took over were armed with the Vadukoddai Resolution that legitimised their violence. Fired up by the Vadukoddai ideology they came out of their cells like bulls in a china shop. They literally went berserk believing that they had the Vadukoddai license to kill everything that crossed their path, including their political fathers.

In the meantime, the ageing Tamil leaders and the Tamil youth continued to maintain their two-pronged attack on the South. Needling the lower-level ethnic leadership of the South was a deliberate and chosen tactic of the Northern provocative politics, wrote Prof. A. J. Wilson, son-in-law of S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, father of Tamil separatism. The joint front of the Tamil elders and the youth were heading towards violence. Clearly, 1976” was segueing, slowly but surely, into 1983”. The explosion of 1983 did not come out of a misguided government turning a blind eye. It was the cumulative reaction to the collective violence unleashed in the Vadukoddai Resolution. No doubt, the aggressive reaction of the lunatic fringe in the South, provoked by the hate politics of Jaffna jingoism, too had aggravated the worsening inter-ethnic relations with reactive mob-violence breaking out sporadically. But the ultimatum issued in the Vadukoddai Resolution, and the provocative violence targeting the Sinhala state” that followed, were heating up communal tensions. Sinhala CTB bus drivers were returning to Colombo from Jaffna complaining that the Tamil shops were refusing to serve even a glass of water. By 1983 the two communities had drawn as far apart as they could. The last straw that broke the back of the Sinhala camel was the killing of the 13 soldiers.

Looking back, it is obvious that 1983” was the Southern reply to the arrogant politics of 1976” and the subsequent increase of violence of the Tamil youth threatening the sovereignty of the nation – the only place available to the Sinhalese in this lonely planet. At least nominally, the Tamil and Muslim communities had other historical havens to which they could withdraw in case the worst came to the worst. The Sinhalese had only Sri Lanka. It was the only base they built exclusively for themselves. Generations of Sinhalese sacrificed their lives to make it their safe haven. They had a historical right to claim it their own. It was not narrow racism / chauvinism. It was their legitimate, historical and natural right. The Vadukoddai Resolution posed a threat to their security and history and their defensive reaction was predictable.

The debate on the whys and the wherefores of 1983”, of course, is not going to end in a hurry. Taken out of its context and viewed as an anti-Tamil outburst of a society gone mad, the Tamils made 1983” the ultimate proof of their need for a divorce. But if it is placed in the context of consequences flowing from the ideological and political violence unleashed in the politics of 1976” and after, it is logical to conclude that 1983” was an inevitable outcome of the preceding Tamil aggressive and provocative politics. They asked for and they got it, was the general reaction of the Sinhalese. The sequence of events that flowed from 1976” ran incrementally, step by step, one leading to another, until escalating violence reached its explosive peak in 1983”.

Provocative rhetoric and actions of the North unravelled slowly but surely into 1983”. The explosion of 1983 was the counter-violence to end Tamil expansionism and aggressive power grab threatening the territorial integrity and the historical heritage left behind by the Founding Fathers of the nation. The ideological and emotional ambience for an ethnic explosion was prepared and fertilized by the Tamil leadership. The Tamil have always been quite clever in digging their own grave. The other two minorities escaped the horrors of a 33-year-old war because their leadership was wise enough not to hand over their grip on power to the misguided youth. It is the restoration of power to the non-violent stream of Tamil politics by the Rajapakse brothers that has introduced a new normalcy which, hopefully, will grow into a new nation.

Sinhala violence has invariably been reactive, responding to provocative political violence of the minorities. And 1983” is no exception. Besides, no responsible Sinhala leader, no respected or established Sinhala community organisation, nor the Sinhala state” had officially declared war against another community, despite the provocative violence they had faced. Like any other state it had reacted defensively to restore peace, and protect territorial integrity and sovereignty. It has never declared a war to impose its supremacy over the other communities.

The live-and-let-live policy of the Sinhala majority did not go beyond sporadic violence of the fringe freaks against the provocative acts of the minorities. Without condoning any kind of violence, it is clear that those explosions were like the fizz of the soda bottle. Sinhala violence has always gone down almost instantly, soon after its explosion, returning the nation to peaceful co-existence. Only the Tamil leadership decided to declare war against the Sinhala state” at Vadukoddai, creating the longest period of brutal violence. Their politics of hate leaves no room for peaceful co-existence. Vadukoddai Resolution was a recipe for separatist violence and chaos. But it was a wave of tsunamic violence that came from the volcanic sifting of the territorial plates in Vadukoddai and nowhere else.

I repeat, separatism and violence are inseparable. It is the kind of politics that can breed only hatred and not reconciliation.

To be continued